State of Montana Arboretum
More than two thousand labeled trees and shrubs turn the University of Montana campus into a dispersed living collection rather than a fenced garden.
Places and wildlife — page 41
Browse Explore’s field guide to destinations, wildlife, art, and the natural world. Open a discovery for practical details and background.
Garden of One Thousand Buddhas
One thousand Buddha figures and one thousand stupas form a Dharma-wheel garden within the homeland of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes.
ZooMontana
A seventy-acre zoological and botanical park emphasizes animals adapted to northern climates within wooded trails and naturalistic habitats.
Grizzly & Wolf Discovery Center
A nonprofit wildlife park provides close observation of bears, wolves, otters, raptors, and other non-releasable animals while interpreting coexistence around Yellowstone.
Missoula Butterfly House and Insectarium
A tropical butterfly house and insectarium pair close observation of life cycles with Montana-focused education about invertebrates and conservation.
Montana Arctic Grayling
Montana’s last native river-dwelling Arctic Grayling population turns a brilliantly patterned dorsal fin into a lesson about cold water, connectivity, and patient restoration.
Meltwater Lednian Stonefly
A tiny stonefly living in Glacier’s coldest headwater streams makes melting ice and rising water temperature measurable as habitat, not abstraction.
Western Glacier Stonefly
Known only from the Glacier–Waterton high country, this cold-water specialist survives where ice, snow, springs, and shaded alpine channels hold summer temperatures down.
Bitterroot
Montana’s state flower hides a surprising strategy: succulent leaves gather early moisture, disappear, and leave luminous pink blossoms seemingly resting on bare stony ground.
Sapphire Rockcress
A Montana-only rockcress survives in scattered dry mountain openings where pale flowers and narrow fruits demand closer study than a showy wildflower display.
Missoula Phlox
Found nowhere beyond Missoula County, this compact phlox survives city-edge winds, shallow soils, recreation, and invasive plants in cushions only inches high.
Buffalo Bill Center of the West
Five distinct museums share one Cody campus, letting you compare Buffalo Bill history, Plains Indian cultures, firearms, western art, and Greater Yellowstone wildlife without reducing the West to a single story.
National Museum of Military Vehicles
More than tanks in a hangar, this museum uses restored vehicles, weapons, uniforms, and personal testimony to explain how American forces moved and fought from World War I onward.
National Historic Trails Interpretive Center
Life-size environments, artifacts, maps, and first-person accounts turn the Oregon, California, Mormon Pioneer, and Pony Express routes into decisions about weight, water, timing, labor, and survival.
Wyoming Dinosaur Center
The museum joins mounted dinosaurs with an active fossil-preparation lab and nearby dig sites, making excavation, documentation, preparation, and reconstruction visible as one scientific process.
Wyoming State Museum
A compact statewide museum moves from geology and archaeology through Indigenous histories, migration, industry, wildlife, politics, and everyday life.
National Museum of Wildlife Art
Wildlife art from many centuries meets a sage-covered sculpture trail above the National Elk Refuge, making the real landscape part of how visitors read anatomy, symbolism, and conservation.
University of Wyoming Geological Museum
Fossils and full-scale mounts anchor a teaching museum where Wyoming fieldwork, stratigraphy, evolution, and reconstruction remain connected to active university research.
Tate Geological Museum
A college museum uses dinosaurs, marine reptiles, Ice Age mammals, minerals, and a visible preparation lab to tell Wyoming’s long environmental history.
The Brinton Museum
The Brinton combines western and American Indian art with the preserved Quarter Circle A Ranch, gardens, outbuildings, and a modern gallery building.
Heart Mountain Interpretive Center
Built beside the former confinement site, the center documents the forced removal and wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans through photographs, barracks materials, oral histories, resistance, military service, and family life.
Cheyenne Frontier Days Old West Museum
The museum preserves Frontier Days history through wagons, saddles, clothing, trophies, posters, and rodeo figures.
Museum of the Mountain Man
Firearms, traps, trade goods, maps, journals, and rendezvous history explain the Rocky Mountain fur trade as a network of Indigenous knowledge, global markets, risky labor, and environmental change.
Nicolaysen Art Museum
Casper’s accredited contemporary-art museum pairs changing exhibitions with an unusually substantial hands-on Discovery Center.
Museum at the Bighorns
A newly relocated downtown museum uses rotating exhibitions and a deep county collection to connect Sheridan with the wider Bighorn region.
National Bighorn Sheep Center
A small, serious center turns Dubois’s relationship with the Whiskey Mountain herd into an unusually focused lesson in wild-sheep conservation.
Fort Laramie National Historic Site
At a river crossroads, surviving buildings and treaty grounds expose how trade and migration became military occupation and contested federal promises.
Fort Bridger State Historic Site
A trading post became a Mormon outpost, an Army depot, a roadside stop, and finally a museum beside the great western trails.
Fort Phil Kearny State Historic Site
Fort outlines, a reconstructed stockade, and two separate battlefields reveal a contested corridor through the Powder River country.
South Pass City State Historic Site
Walk an unusually intact mining town, then enter the restored Carissa Mill to follow Wyoming gold from ore cart to concentrate.
Wyoming Territorial Prison State Historic Site
Enter Wyoming’s 1872 stone prison to read confinement, forced routine, reform experiments, and outlaw fame through cells, records, and prison-made brooms.
Trail End State Historic Site
A 1913 Flemish Revival mansion turns one family’s original rooms and objects into a close reading of ranch wealth, technology, labor, and public life.
Historic Governors’ Mansion
Wyoming’s first purpose-built executive residence reveals how nineteen first families—and the staff supporting them—made state government domestic from 1905 to 1976.
Ames Monument State Historic Site
A blunt 60-foot granite pyramid marks the vanished railroad town of Sherman—and a corporate attempt to monumentalize the financiers behind the transcontinental line.
Independence Rock State Historic Site
A low granite outcrop beside the Sweetwater became the overland trails’ most famous deadline marker—and a fragile archive of more than 5,000 names.
Oregon Trail Ruts State Historic Site
Thousands of westbound wagons and hooves wore a single sandstone crossing into some of the deepest surviving ruts on the overland trails.
Register Cliff State Historic Site
Names and dates on a 100-foot bluff preserve individual voices from a major overnight camp on four westward routes.
Medicine Lodge State Archaeological Site
A long sandstone shelter, excavated deposits, and living Indigenous interpretation connect more than 10,000 years of human presence.
Legend Rock State Petroglyph Site
A protected cliff preserves thousands of years of Indigenous rock art along a quiet, numbered interpretive trail.
White Mountain Petroglyphs
Hundreds of incised figures and hand hollows turn a pale Red Desert cliff into a record of ceremony, hunting, contact, and living Tribal significance.
Vore Buffalo Jump
A guided descent into a red-walled sinkhole reveals stacked bone beds, stone tools, and the practical decisions behind communal Plains bison hunts.
Medicine Wheel / Medicine Mountain National Historic Landmark
A low limestone wheel, 28 spokes, and six perimeter enclosures rest on a windswept summit sacred to many Native nations.
Yellowstone National Park
Heat, water, fire, wildlife, and weather continually remake more than 2.2 million acres at the center of a much larger ecosystem.
Grand Teton National Park
The Teton Range rises without foothills above sage flats, braided river channels, and a chain of glacier-carved lakes.
Fossil Butte National Monument
Exceptionally complete fossils preserve an entire warm Eocene lake community, from stingrays and bats to insects, palms, and tiny horses.
Hot Springs State Park
Hot mineral water builds living travertine terraces beside the Bighorn River, where a free public bath house and a drive-through bison pasture make geology unusually tangible.
Curt Gowdy State Park
Halfway between Cheyenne and Laramie, three working reservoirs meet an unusually varied network of granite singletrack, quiet coves, campgrounds, and high-country forest.
Sinks Canyon State Park
The Middle Fork Popo Agie plunges into fractured Madison Limestone at the Sinks, then returns downstream at the Rise by a route that dye tracing proved—but still has not fully mapped.